


Diversions

by shai



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Pigeons, awkward smalltalk, featuring:, in which Agnes Montague does normal human things, parks, pubs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 09:40:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20207629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shai/pseuds/shai
Summary: "Did you go on holiday this summer?" the boy asks.He's sat with Agnes on a bench, body twisted towards her attentively, but still a good two hands-widths away.She tilts her head back up at the oak tree above them, wondering if any journey she'd made would count as a 'holiday'.





	Diversions

Agnes had spent decades listening quietly while other people planned her life around her. When she accepted a date with the coffee shop boy, it wasn't about the boy himself, it was the tiniest little push back against the inexorable trajectory of her fate, a brief moment's diversion from what really mattered.

The boy was noticeable only for having noticed her. Lanky. Pallid. Havering and nervous. But he listens to her even when he doesn't understand. He's eager to know her, to treat everything she offers as a gift. The followers of the Lightless Flame have worked to make her herself for years: they're convinced they know her. None of them would dare say they feel _entitled_ to her, but they've invested years plotting to make her who and what she is. They cannot see her without seeing their long-awaited apocalyse.

"Did you go on holiday this summer?" the boy asks.

He's sat with Agnes on a bench, body twisted towards her attentively, but still a good two hands-widths away.

She tilts her head back up at the oak tree above them, wondering if any journey she'd made would count as a 'holiday'.

"I went to Bruges last winter."

"Ooh, I've never been to Holland! How was it?"

"... Belgium, actually." Agnes says. It had been February: frost on the ground, its touch fresh and sweet on her bare skin. They had been there to reclaim one of their master’s sacred texts. The old man who owned the bookshop had fainted from pain as she touched a hand to his face and then Jude had laughed and started crushing his fingers under her steel-toed boots until he woke up.

An even less worthy custodian of the book than the thief Leitner, who at least knew a little of the nature of his predators. She should feel satisfaction in the memory.

“Oh, Belgium, of course! I’ve actually never been to Europe, I’d love to go some day. I can’t even picture it, I’ve seen Paris on telly but...”

Agnes tries to imagine what a tourist would have remembered. “It was a small town. Stone. Solidly built, but the streets wove into one another. You could tell it was built before cars.”

A bird lands on the ground just a few metres from her right foot, tilts its head as if it thinks she might have crumbs for it. Not scared of the humans sat nearby.

“It snowed the day we left, and the sky was this dark grey-purple-blue from the train window. It felt… calm. I liked it.”

He doesn’t ask what she did while she was there. She watches the bird, which is grey and fat with bits of green on its neck and little orange eyes.

He talks about places he’d like to visit. She lets the words wash over her. It is calming to listen to the dreams of someone so deeply boring. He has never been truly afraid. His ambitions are little things: see this statue six hundred miles away, eat this food.

If she bought him tickets to fly to Florence with her it’d buy his devotion as surely as she has Jude’s. She doesn’t want it, though.  
She goes with Eugene Vanderstock to Keay Books. Mary laughs at them, tells them they’re too late and that she’s got nothing their kind would want.

Vanderstock is ready to nod and leave. Agnes steps in close to the old witch, sees the fringe of her scarf deform in the heat of her attention, the synthetic fabric starting to melt. Mary snarls with a kind of animal fury, eyes furious under her tattoos.

Agnes breathes in, leaning close enough to see the uneven spread of mascara on Mary’s individual eyelashes, to see the woman’s breathing hitch. She can’t tell what kind of a thing Mary is. The woman doesn’t seem normal. But is that because she’s the servant of another power, or because of another kind of witchcraft, or just… force of personality? 

Agnes does not think she has ever wanted anything for herself as powerfully as Mary wants to keep her books of power.

But Agnes is more powerful, more perfectly an expression of Desolation than Mary could be of anything. She gives them the book: an early manuscript of Farenheit 451, with some significant additions. Agnes sends Eugene to find them a hotel room and sits leafing through it in the Five Tuns across the road, ignoring the voicemail on her mobile phone telling her where to meet him. She is not reading so much as letting her eyes fall out of focus on the page and seeing which words rise to her attention. It is a communion of a sort.

She loses track of time, and is surprised to glance up and see only a few people left in the pub. She’s sat in one of the four-person booths at the back of the bar. There’s a few ‘old boys’ (as Arthur calls them) at the bar, their conversation broken up by laughter and jovial shoulder-thumping. A couple sat near the door holding hands. And... a long-haired man is standing with his hands in his pockets respectfully outside her booth, watching her at a polite distance as if just waiting for her to look up.

Black hair, shoulder-length, a little unkempt. Stubble on his jaw in a way she finds aesthetically pleasing. Heavy eyebrows, pieced. A band t-shirt with a bleeding eye under unintelligible faux-gothic script. Arthur Nolan had mentioned Mary had a son. Even beyond the goth things, they have a similar kind of intensity to them.

He raises an one eyebrow at her as she looks up: “Enjoying your studies there?”

She nods. She has been, actually.

“Can I get you a drink?”

She looks at him sceptically.

“I’m not after the book, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t want anything to do with the bloody things, Desolation least of all. Leitner was a damn fool to go looking for ‘em in the first place if you ask me.”

Arrogant of him to expect say so when she hadn’t asked. But… there is some appeal to the idea of talking to someone who knows enough to curse the name of her master. She gestures at the seat opposite, an invitation.

He smiles at her, a slightly lop-sided expression, shrugs a battered rucksack off his shoulder onto the seat. “What are you drinking?”

She looks at the cup of tea sat untouched in front of her since she’d arrived at four fifteen.

“Yeah, not that, obviously. You a soft drinks person? Beer, or wine?”

“I don’t really… drink.”

“Huh. As in you can’t, or you just don’t need to?”

She has never considered those two separate options.

“I was told I was… above such things.”

He scratches his chin, tilts his head from side to side. “Well, I’ll get two drinks, and you’d welcome to try either.”

She watches him head over to the bar, sees him engage in conversation with the old blokes perched there. It appears seamless, the way he slips between talking to her about her inhumanity and them about whatever ‘best bitters’ are.

Even her most rebellious acts feel like a mimicry of the normal human social experience. When she moves from talking to her brothers and sisters of the Lightless Flame to a coffee shop, it is an awkward inexpert thing. This son of an initiate is probably decades younger than her, but he seems to swim just as easily in either current. 

But then, he looks more human than not.

“Name’s Gerard, by the way,” he says when he comes back, placing two drinks equidistant between the two of them. One is a small but solid glass, of which only a third of so is filled with an amber liquid, the other bigger, with a marker on the side to indicate the level of a full pint's worth of liquid. It is filled with something dark brown.

“… Agnes.”

“This here’s an 8-year-old Caol Ila,” he says, gesturing at the smaller glass. “Whisky. Single malt. They say the peat in it makes it taste like smoke.”

He tips a hand towards it, offering without being pushy.

She pulls the glass towards her, tilts it. Whisky, a spirit. The golden colour of the drink is appealing. The alcohol smell is aggressively strong.

She takes a sip and rolls it around her mouth. It does burn, the physical sensation almost strong enough to stop any somatic flavour registering at all. It’s… more an experience than a drink. There is something like woodsmoke to it, stinging the back of the throat but also comforting. She shuts her eyes to better pay attention to the taste it leaves in her mouth.

Gerard reaches out as if to take the other drink, then stops: “Want to try this too? It’s a beer called a stout, strong but also sweet.”

She considers, then nods.

The beer is a rich and complex flavour, but not nearly so intense; warming, almost spiced.

It has been a long time since she’d eaten or drunk anything. Her body has been transformed; this is not the sustenance she requires. But then, the purpose of a pub is to be a social venue, not to provide efficient ways to fulfil bodily needs. The boy was talking about this the other day: some psychologist, Maslow, talking about what is needed and what is only wanted.

She looks down at the two glasses, the intricate entertainment that humans devise for themselves. 

She pushes the beer back to Keay’s son, keeps the whisky in its special glass to cup between her hands.

“Thank you.”

**Author's Note:**

> next in my quest to write Gerard Keay Wanders The TMA Universe Talking To Strangers: Agnes. I love Agnes and the ambiguity canon leaves her "actually DO i want to bring more Desolation into the world" internal struggle.
> 
> I might write 'Gerard And Agnes Have An Actual Conversation', but I love how her story is always told by character who are making assumptions about her, and I preserved the ambiguity by not allowing her to directly confront her feelings about Desolation's ritual. if I write a second chapter of them talking I'll break that silence and make a buncha assumptions about her, but I figured I'd let this stand alone as my take on Agnes-as-seen-in-canon for now.
> 
> (I wish it wasn't canon that she never met Gertrude, my kingdom for a potential girl love interest other than Jude who woulda been around at this time period.....)


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